Dunromin University Press is up and Running!

Dated: 14 Aug, 2019

Welcome to the first Blog Post!

This is a gateway into a fantastic new realm of Fantasy Role Playing!  Since its inception in 1986 the City of Dunromin and the world on which it sits, Barnaynia, have been played in and developed using AD&D and OSRIC rules by many new and experienced players.  All that depth of development has now been brought together in the Players' Guide to Dunromin and the Games Master's Guide to Dunromin.  These are the proud results of years of work by me and my friends.

The idea of this blog is to give you some insights into the character and philosophy of the creators of the world and some of the history of it's developemt.  As this is the first Blog post it seems fair I should explain what it all is and where it came from...

It all started at Lancashire Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire) in the Coffee Shop at the top of the Student Union building.  This place was the long-established main meeting place for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, then run by Ray Jennings, and was equipped with a meeting room, a number of video games, some pool tables and some comfy seating areas with tables that were perfect for playing RPGs at.  It was our 'place' and you could guarantee meeting someone from the Soc there any time after noon.  Plus there was a bar downstairs with regular cheap offers on.  What's not to like?

There are so many strange and wonderful stories we could all share from then but Dunromin and Barnaynia were specifically spontaneously created during a 72-hour charity Role-Playing session for Rag Week.  Some photos exist!  I was DMing the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh for the players' newly rolled characters and, after gaining some loot, they went "back to their city" to train and such.  I made up the name "Dunromin" on the spur of the moment and it became the base for the campaign that grew out of the 72-hour session and then ran for 3 years until we all finsihed our courses.  Dunromin has featured as the base for every campaign I have run ever since.

I became chairman of the SF&F Soc the next academic year (Sept 1987) and was then on a work placement for most of the year.  During this time I obtained some lab books and some large sheets of graph paper and drew the first version of the city map now available in the Travellers' Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young (available for a free download from DriveThruRPG.com).  The layout of the city hasn't changed much, but the quality of the map itself has improved vastly.  Since then the original map has been burnt, lost, found and lost again, although photocopies do exist...

The details of the guilds, temples, NPCs and Royal Family, history and other stuff were first written in the two lab books, which I still have, and then typed up into soft-form later.  The maps were re-worked using Campaign Cartographer (thoroughly recommended) by Mark "Penfold" Wardale and using GIMP (also excellent) by myself.  They were brought together in their current book form in early 2018 and edited, added to, proofed and play-tested since then.

Barnaynia, the world on which Dunromin sits, was an even more spontaneous creation:  There was an in-character debate between Adrian "Arse!" Bell and Pete Leary about whether the world was round or flat.  It was just after dawn on the second day of the 72-hours and we were all a bit woozy, to be honest.  To try and get people back into the game I told them they were both wrong and that the world was Banana shaped; everyone knew that.  It is possible this idea bubbled up from my subconscious as a line from Monty-Python and the Holy Grail but we ran with it anyway.  This explanation satisfied Pete but Adrian continued to take issue with it.  I pointed out to him that he should compare the view east to the view north (the coffee shop is on the third or fourth floor on the top of a hill so has an excellent panoramic view of the area).  We noted that (due to local geography) the eastern horizon curved slightly more then the northern horizon.  Adrian (still in character) admitted this was so in good humour and the concept of a banana-shaped world was born; later called Barnaynia.

The first world drawings followed soon after and were also tidied and updated into the form you can download now.